Noord Brabant

Noord Brabant.

Yesterday, I had a bit of an adventure. But a very fun one! It started out a bit rocky (and wet!) but in the end it was really nice and fun. I went to go visit my mother's cousins, in Noord Brabant. They are on the farm, about 3 hours away from where I live in Venlo, right by the border of Zeeland.

The thing about farms are they aren't the most convenient to get to, so the closest train station is about 16 km away from where they live. So being the silly sport I am, I decided to take the train and then my bike to their place. It was actually a great idea, but the fact that is was raining put a little damper on my plans. However, stubborn as I ever was, I prevailed, and showed up to their place pretty darn wet. Agnet, lovely as always, gave me a change of clothes and then I got to see the family farm.

I actually remember visiting their old farm in Pijnacker about 11 years ago (I think! Correct me if I am wrong mother!), but since then they have relocated so that they could expand. It was by far the coolest farm I've been on, not that I have been on many farms really. Here they do mostly diary farming, with a bit of corn,( the former owners of the company didn't do diary farming at all). The farm was big, they have about 200 cows, and a bull (lucky dude). The cool part is that the milking is pretty much all automatic, and when I say pretty much, I mean completely. So instead of doing it manually (and when I mean manually, I still mean automatic) the process is streamlined and the cows are milked 24hrs a day, and when I say that, I don't mean that cows are constantly hooked-up and being milked. There are 3 automatic milking machines that take one cow at a time to milk. Each cow is milked 2-4 times a day, and does so whenever it wants to, with the incentive stemming from the powerfeed it gets in the milking station and the relief they feel from being milked. So these cows pretty much have the life, they can sleep when they want, wander when they want, sadly they don't graze, but they just chill out, and whenever they feel their titties hanging low they can dish out 10kg of milk at the milking machine(24 hours of the day!! this place is like NYC, open alll the time) .

Automatic Milking Machine

Barn

I could go on for hours about the farm and the process, I asked tons of questions because I really found it so cool. The amount of automation (and the amount of information kept in their ID necklace) was astonishing for me, it was really cool. However, it is kind of chilling when I think how easily they could do this to humans (Brave New World anyone). However as much as Big Brother is creepy, wouldn't it be cool if there were statistics about everything you do(I'm sure google has this, and really, I don't care, but I'd LOVE to see mine!) , and you get fed exactly what you need, it's also pretty similar to the last book in the hunger games, district 13.

2 week old cow!

Baby Cows are so cute. Just thought I would add that one in. There was a 2 week old calf and it was adorable, I let him suck on my finger. Also cows only have bottom teeth, fun fact that I didn't know until today.

Other then being completely fascinated by the normal farming activities, we had tea and had some lunch (sandwiches, who'da guessed it, in the netherlands) and I learnt a few more dutch words. Agnet and John have five children, but only 2 of them are living with them in De Heen, the two youngest 11 and 13. Denis, the 13 year old had a friend staying with him from Pijnacker for a couple days.

The Family and Dennis' friend Eric.